


You Are Dean Winchester in 2014

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse, M/M, Poetry, deancest, femme!Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-04 03:05:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're in a car with a beautiful you and it's the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Are Dean Winchester in 2014

**Author's Note:**

> Based on "You are Jeff" by Richard Siken. Also guest starring Dead Eye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut in certain phrases and themes.
> 
> Content warnings: brief mentions of violence, vague mentions of Dean's alcohlism, depression.

**1**.

There are two yous in a 67 impala painted black. You wear pink panties, and the other you has a gun strapped to your thigh. You can’t choose between need and want. You don’t even know how to tell them apart like you can’t tell if you’re really not hungry or if you’re just sad. You want to undo your boot laces, take off your gun belt, and walk in your socks on a clean hard floor, the holes in the toe all stitched up. What if you smelled coffee on your breath in the morning instead (you're told there hasn't been coffee in camp since 2013, and the cream’s all gone sour with ants in the sugar). It could be the beautiful day to a brave new world where you are not afraid for once. Consider the gun strapped to your thigh. Consider the pink satin panties. 

 **2**.

There are two yous in a 67 impala painted black. Let’s call you Dean, and other you Dean as well. The Dean who was here first--the Dean here in 2014 with a gun strapped to your thigh--is older, and therefore responsible for saving the world but not yourself because this Dean is not of the world, are you? Hell-worn, heaven-weary, a would-be coulda-shoulda-been momma’s boy, this Dean, this you, will never win when it comes down to what you want--you wonder if you know what this other you, this first you, wants anymore. Do you want it to end, to just end, or to trust this newer you, this younger you to make the choices you didn’t make when you could have, should have. You think about the strip of road, paved in black tar, that separates you, the both of you--roadsides parked with just you and a beer and the stars, bodies left behind in the smoke of your engines. Call shotgun and say drive--put highway not between you but behind you, wrap yourself in ribbons of asphalt, high on the fumes of your exhaust, so you can relive the last time you smiled with nothing in your rear view but a blur of red desert or green forest or faces that you used to know.

 **3**.

There are two yous in a 67 impala painted black. You think about the future you were promised by everyone but your dad: a family, a home, some kids, a 40 hour job you’ll hate, and clean sheets to slip between on a bed with a mattress you flip every other week. In these stories, you are confident, assured, a well-respected man--you trust yourself, and you think, boy that’s beautiful. You’re not surprised to see you like this in the future, finger curled around a trigger, lips around a bottle--but you grieve anyway. Your name is Dean and you’re tired of looking at the tired slump of your shoulders, at the way you cut your hair. Your name is Dean and you’re tired of your thick heavy jackets because it’s always cold no matter where you are. Come on, Dean, you say. It was supposed to be different, you say. Yeah, right.

 **4**.

Your name is Dean and somewhere up ahead you, other Dean, older Dean, Old Man Dean, has pulled to the side of the road and given up. You want to look you in the eye and say, hey, you okay (because if older you is not okay then how are you okay or ever will be okay), but you will not look you in the eye. You wonder if older you hates your face--and just this morning you already thought it was an old face, your bones creaking, your muscles aching, never given a chance to really heal, to become soft and pliant in safe summer houses. It’s hard being hard all the time--like you are crafted of stone by the hands of your fathers, but even rocks will weep water if they’re struck hard enough (but please don't, please don't).

 **5**.

Let’s say that God in his High Heaven has decided to call off the Apocalypse, but the board has already been set, the pieces in motion, the brothers rehearsing for their swan song. He wants to call it off, but they are dust in the wind from his hands.

Let’s say that the devil is played by someone you love, while you occupy the space between him and you and god our father. You can’t stop it either, and you’re wrestling with your brother, promising not to hurt him, and you’re wrestling with you, yelling at you to man up and to do what you need to do, or so help you god.

You want to lie down. You want to sleep and forget about everything, about the names other you needled under your skin. You just want someone to call it off, just call it off. You’re so tired.

 **6**.

You’d rather share a drink with other you--that, you know how to do. You’ve shared many an evening with just you and a bottle of beer and a hard mattress. You stare and stare at your pink rosebud mouth, at the slip of teeth that sometimes shine through. You think about those teeth, at the way they bite down on your lip like you’ll hang on even if it tears you apart, like you’re still just an echo of the days of the rending of clothes and the gnashing of teeth. You remember that mom used to wear lip balm smelling vaguely of vanilla and mint and maybe beeswax, a seal over her lips like a kiss. Your pink, rosebud mouth is chapped by the wind and the way you constantly lick at it. Yours is too--you know this as you lick over the swell of it, nervous and hungry.

 **7**.

Don’t look at you like that. Your eyes are green flint. You ask questions you don’t know how to answer. You shift uncomfortably. You want you to stop talking. Put your tongue in your mouth. Shut up. Don’t leave like you don’t have a second thought if even a first thought. Let’s fuck like we hate or love each other.

Do you sound the same when you come?

 **8**.

Do you sound the same when you’re hit hard on your chin with somebody’s fist (your brother’s, god’s, fate’s, does it matter)? When you’re kneed hard in the groin? You want to find out. You don’t want to find out. You look at the empty space over your shoulder and imagine something nicer than the drafty cabin you find both your selves in so that you don’t have to look at your face; it was easier when you only had to worry about the mirrors.

 **9**.

You think about a boy’s bedroom, the bedroom you’ve always wanted. No bunk bed because this bedroom is yours, all yours and no one else can come in accept if they ask and you say yes. You think about the pictures of space and space ships on your hypothetical walls. You think about the books your mother used to read out loud to you when you were small because in this universe, she’s still alive, she’s always alive. You think about your dresser with the knee high socks and the tube of lipstick and the cast off mascara and the pink panties. Older you has probably forgotten about your imaginary bedroom. Running to the drugstore is about survival--and you think how unfair it is that this part of you isn’t deemed worthy of survival too as you rummage in your pockets for the tube of lipstick that isn’t here and that nobody would take the time to take or spare the space to keep. You want to ask you if you still sing in the shower like you sing in the car.

 

 **10**. 

You can’t tell where other you lays your head at night. All the make shift tents and cabins look the same. No shrine exists of memory or hope or loss--only the abandoned graveyard of your car testifies that you once existed once upon a time--like you too, have finally forgotten and abandoned you. Chin up, Dean Winchester. It’s not so bad. Mercy is given to those who don’t deserve it and maybe you do, maybe you don’t but judgment is always present, always there, in the ways that these fleeting ghosts and memories and shadows aren’t. Hush now. There are no more doors for god to close and windows to open in their place. You’re all alone, except for you, and since you’re you and you’re you, it’s one and the same, isn’t it? Two bodies of the same self breathing the same air as they consume their own carbon dioxide.

 **11**.

Suppose, for a moment, that you share a heart with your other self. You think about this as you look up at you as you squat down beside you, gun in hand, and holster strapped to your thigh like its home. You tug at the cuffs. You can escape from these, but there is no place to escape to because this is not your home, and it’s impossible that you could ever really escape from hellfire, even though you wish you could save yourself.

No that’s not what you wish at all.

You wish you never had to be saved in the first place. That someone--that you--could whisper into the shell of your freckled ear: there is no danger, not here, not anymore, not ever.

You sag limp in your cuffs.

 **12**. 

Consider the pink satin panties. They are waiting for you like the blush creeping up your neck to be scrubbed clean with a hot shower that’s never hot enough. The music played Led Zeppelin’s stairway to heaven and you followed it for seven whole minutes. You play the song in the impala again, purr of her motor close as the pink kiss between your thighs and the red high rises of your cheeks as you drive and drive. Who do you love, Dean? What do you love? Your panties are a faded oil rag, and your car’s gutted for spare parts. Your road to somewhere split down the middle of your lip, slick with gun oil and lipstick, and your secret’s a spun bridge unraveling at the edges. You could say, come back to my motel the one with the mattress and the warm running water, you still have them stuffed in your bags, and we’ll go for a drive, just you and me and a pair of pink satin panties, we’ll drive and drive. But you hit hard left. You move on. The apocalypse looms and leaves no room for you to be soft in a scrapped caress of fabric.  Oh how hard the cuffs you put on you bite into your skin.

 **13**.

This time, it’s just a dream, and it’s not really real. You have black eyes or maybe they're just made of white light. Let’s say you have black eyes (or no eyes). Let’s say that instead of being possessed by a demon you’ve become the demon, carved you inside out until you’re so hollow and empty you just need to fill someone like somebody's angel, so it might as well be you because that’s all you’re good for anyway. It’s not a love story—it never is with you. It’s a tragedy where you die, where you always die, because you’re a poor son of a bitch who doesn’t know any better and who thinks the only ending you deserve is the one that’s unhappy because it’s easier to use a knife than to speak an exorcism. So much for that.

Let’s say you’ll come back from this with hellfire in your soul and green in your eyes. It’s a resurrection like you’re god’s only son. Do you love yourself anyway?

 **14**.

After you pick yourself free because you’re too big of a dick to let you go even if you can't trust yourself, you wander the camp. The only milk they’ve got is powdered Nido. The only beer something you know you’re not thirsty enough to drink. Someone’s grown a garden of pot and your fingers itch to role paper. You find you after you’ve stopped replaying the way you pulled the trigger over and over. You stand by and watch the sun hang itself through the crowned horizon of trees like god’s second coming, angels singing glory hallelujah. You gotta say yes, one of you says. You remember how in Sunday School class, before dad made us all stop going, you learned how he was the potter and you were the clay, well every pot is empty and waiting to be filled, you say, waiting to be filled with light. You see the way you stare at the pink-ribboned sun until you think you’ll go blind—your lovely lips open as you say yes like a litany, and you think—you could knee yourself in the chest to break that syllabic rosary, pour yourself into that mouth because you’re you and you’re yours and you—the other you the one who pulled the trigger, the one with the gun strapped to your thigh, shakes you now, begging you to say yes not to you but to some angel, thumbs and fingers pressed along the hand shaped scar on your bicep, and you find the mirrored mark on your other arm and you grip just as tight because you think for one brief moment that maybe you can be saved from this, and then you are alone because one of you has let the other go. 

 **15**.

You stare hard at yourself, and wonder what’s under your shirt. Have scars you bear now faded, only to be replaced with new ones? You want to find them, you want you to mirror them on your body with your tongue and your teeth and your mouth. You want to count each rib, fingers finding where they’ve been broken and the crooked seam where they’ve knit themselves back together again.

You wonder how many more times your body will be reset to original factory settings. How many times the stories your body bears will be erased as if they had never been, as if your experiences had never been yours.

 **16**. 

You and you—well, you’re not making out in the corner booth of a seedy bar. It’d be easier doing that with your eyes closed than staring up at him, nose to nose and sharing breath that smells like stale beer you drank two nights ago. You’re tired of paying for your mistakes—the one’s you’ve made, the one’s you’re making, the one’s you’re going to make—but you deserve it—you always choose the hand of judgement every time because mercy is a children’s story. You try to prove to you that you’re not some monster, even though you’ve passed the silver test, and you’ve slipped a laugh through you smile-splintered lips because you’re a hunter and you’ll always be a hunter it’s not personal it’s just business. You’re surrounded by your voice, and you can’t even tell which one is yours, it all sounds so much the same to you. You wish everyone would just shut up and consider the pink satin panties.  

 **17**.

You could race neck and neck for the finish line home—but other you has gutted your second home into another skeleton in your closet. You slide into your impala, your baby, hands on the wheel, and wait for you to call shot gun driver picks the music and you shut your pie hole. You’re next to you, so close your too-big jackets brush at the cuffs—but you’re wandering forest papered rooms and you think you might be the wolf in the big bad wood watch out little red riding hood. You find yourself, stare into your eyes. They stay green like the forest, but the walls fall away and you’re dancing, you’re racing, neck and neck, tires squealing, you’re there and you’re not, you’re on the road again, ribbon of black pavement your stairway to heaven but you’re lost you’re just a lonely child of god stay put don’t move. Don’t move.

 **18**.

Two yous: one of you wants to wash the shattered parts of you away, the other wants to gather the whole of your parts with pink satin thread. Which one are you?  You want a scapegoat? You only have you. You and you. You’re in high school again, you’re sixteen again and a deadeye shot, you’re tapping a pencil in rhythm with your pulse as geometry explains your broken heart. You think there’s space for the whole of you, even the parts you’ve lost, the ones torn from your flesh, the parts filleted from you and served to you on silver platters, the missing parts that’s left you an instrument of god sculptured by Dad’s voice haunting your shadow—there’s room for all those parts of you in the backseat of the impala, but she lies hollow and fallow like the pit of your stomach with no place for you. You thought you’d be safe with your rock and roll, your bad reputation like joan jett, black paint gleaming in the sun of your green green eyes. But you couldn’t stay, never given time to say goodbye to the you who charmed your way through high school and read Vonnegut when no one was looking but you (furtively over your shoulder), and the you who looks up at you now with the gun strapped to your thigh. Look at you, look at me. You are here. Don’t leave, don’t turn your back on you, on me, on us—not this time. If you won’t listen, at least give you the time to say goodbye so you can salt and burn the bones of you, no longer waiting for the you that was, the you that might have been, the you that should have been, the you that could have been if only.

 **19**.

Here is your name and here is your gun and here are the things you left behind: the sound your boy-lips made licking strawberry jam from sandwiches your mother made, your pink satin panties, one half eaten bag of funions shoved under the seat so you don’t eat them all in one sitting. The jingle your silver ring made against your keys. The soft whisper of your beaded bracelets slipping across your sweaty skin as you ran towards the things that wanted to kill you—you don’t remember when they left you, you never even heard them fall.

Look at your gun, Dean, your silver floral barreled gun with your name on it. It’s not the only thing you have left.

You have me.

 **20**.

There are two yous in a 1967 impala painted black but not actually because you are home—you both are home where the radio station doesn’t just play classic rock but something new that you might kind of like—because yeah they still have radio stations from when you come from imagine that. Imagine you are home—but what are you doing home? Get up! There’s an apocalypse that you have to keep failing to stop. Let’s say you’re not home anymore—you’re not you with your pink panty secret and you’re just one guy that you used to know, and you’re talking to you through the pain of your fist landing on your jaw, and the cold steel of your handcuffs biting into your wrists. What are you even doing here? You’re too late—like always. You should be back in the motel room, praying yes to angels, baring your throat like a scarlet threaded scapegoat. Your tongue’s a barren wasteland as you tell yourself these things—as you demand these things of you, as you ask so much of you. You never even asked you for dinner first. Come on, come home with me, we’ll share a beer together you and me, put our feet up with both boots off, but you’ve left you alone in the room, empty save for no one but you.

 **21**.

Hold on—hold on to you. Don’t leave until you come back for you because this doesn’t have to be hell. This could be the end. This could be more than your graveyard. Leave the car running, leave threads of pink satin through the tunnels of your heart, and kiss the person you find in the center there. Dream about the things you used to do. Dream about the oil slicks on your thumb. Dream about popping a cold one. Dream about star trek marathons on the sci fi channel. Dream about day old pizza and chocolate cake and not feeling guilty afterwards. Dream about that picture of Mom tucked in your wallet, already washed twice on accident. Dream about being kissed. Sing Bon Jovi two shades off tune—follow the sound of your voice, keep singing so there’s no room for goodbye.

 **22**.

Someone wanted an apocalypse when you wanted to sleep but you couldn’t go to bed then, you were sick, you were wounded, you burned in hell, and you couldn’t climb your way out—you know because you remember it too. Perhaps you can stop it, stop the apocalypse that wears your face even though it should be yours and no one else’s. Hey—when’s the last time you looked in the mirror? When’s the last time you saw your face without seeing someone else’s meat suit? When’s the last time you didn’t tell yourself you had to stop it because you don’t know if you can. You don’t know if you’re strong enough. Maybe you don’t want to be strong enough. Maybe you’re tired of being strong enough—you just want to sleep with both boots off, plaid shirt crumpled up in a hamper over pink panties, ready to be washed on friday which is laundry day which is always laundry day in your dream. 

 **23**.

Let’s say that you are in the space between God and the Devil. Here: you’ll be all of them — You and You and You are standing in a graveyard in Kansas just off the highway playing the radio with the volume up so loud the windows in your impala shake and your bones shake as your lips tremble. There are no more doors and no more windows—they’ve been locked from the outside. All of you try to tell you something. Come closer, so you can whisper it with your lips close to your ear. It’s like seeing your face on flatbread, or in the stars that freckle your skin, or in a pane of stained glass.

You fall to your knees, longing for soft beds and clean sheets and a pillow to rest your head and sleep until you die. 

 **24**.

You’re in a car with a beautiful you. You feel like you’ve done something wrong, like you didn’t turn left when you should have or you said it’s okay when it wasn’t or you pulled the covers up over your head because you’re so tired of playing let’s be heroes. You’re trying not to say hey who are you because you know exactly who you are, but then you reach over and you grip your shoulder, like back in the old days, the nights where your litany was we got work to do, and you know what you need but you can’t move your arms and you’ve hugged yourself since four years old against cold nights and nightmares, so you already know it wouldn’t mean much coming from you.

You sit still in a car beside a beautiful you, and do nothing.


End file.
